1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for generating a two-dimensional code that is printed together with an electronic document when the electronic document is printed.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is known a printing system embedding a machine-recognizable code (a code to be embedded such as a two-dimensional code) into a print image, when printing an electronic document which has been created by use of an application program. This system receives additional information related to the electronic document (hereinafter, called information to be embedded), for example, converts the information to be embedded into the code to be embedded, and then prints the code to be embedded on a sheet for an output together with the electronic document designated to be printed. When this sheet is copied, the sheet is scanned and read by a scanner for detecting the embedded code, embedded information is acquired from the detected embedded code, and print processing is performed according to the embedded information.
Meanwhile, there is known a technique performing the embedding processing according to print setting information. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-003390 (1999) discloses a technique in which, even when N-up printing is designated and a print image is compressed, a print size of the embedded code is kept constant regardless of a compression ratio of the print image for preventing miss-recognition in the read processing of the embedded code. Here, the N-up printing is a function to compress and print a plurality of pages of documents all together on a single sheet for saving a print cost or a filing space.
In the above printing system, optimization of the information to be embedded is desired for speeding up generation processing of the code to be embedded in printing or speeding up read-scan/recognition processing by the scanner after the printing. In the conventional technique, however, the code to be embedded is generated from the information to be embedded for each page in the N-up printing. Accordingly, there are the following problems in the conventional technique.
Even when there is information common to pages, the code to be embedded is generated for each page individually and the information common to pages is repeatedly embedded in each page.
Generating the codes to be embedded of N pages makes control information used for managing the embedded information redundant.